HTML Help: Determining Page Age

Is there a way to determine how old a web page is? Sometimes it would be nice to know if the information is fresh or years old.

There is a way, but it has limitations. Load the page you want to know about into your browser and then paste:

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

...into the address bar of your browser and press the Enter key. A JavaScript alert will tell you when the page was last modified.

The limitations are two:

If the page is dynamic (generated from a database), or...

If the page has dynamic content such as news feeds, or has advertising called from another server (like Google Ads), or has other "live" feeds, the alert will always give you the date and time you loaded the page.

That's because the page is modified every time it is loaded. The alert isn't incorrect, it's just misleading unless you understand how it works.

This concludes the

HTML Help about Determining a Web Pages Last Updated Date

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